


Its L'Manberg

by aeaers



Category: DreamSMP (Video Blogging RPF), Minecraft (Video Game), Video Blogging RPF
Genre: (not on purpose), Angst, Coming Out, Gen, General Wilbur Soot, Internalized Transphobia, It/Its Pronouns for Wilbur Soot, Misgendering, Self-Acceptance, Self-Harm, Smoking, Trans Wilbur Soot, Villain Wilbur Soot, Wilbur Soot-centric
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-22
Updated: 2021-02-22
Packaged: 2021-03-18 19:16:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,046
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29614170
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aeaers/pseuds/aeaers
Summary: “I- I’m just glad L’Manberg is ours, man. She’s beautiful,” Tommy says with a flourish, tossing out his hand.“It’sbeautiful,” is what spills from Wilbur’s lips unbidden, unconscious and yet something very deliberate in the words.He's not sure why.----------------The original version of the L'Manberg National Anthem reads 'Its L'Manberg.' Later, "My L'Manberg."The line's always meant the same thing to Wilbur.
Relationships: Wilbur Soot & TommyInnit
Comments: 7
Kudos: 123





	Its L'Manberg

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Neopronouns with Sleepy Bois Inc and Friends](https://archiveofourown.org/works/29548413) by [williaminnit](https://archiveofourown.org/users/williaminnit/pseuds/williaminnit). 



> just a preemptive notice:
> 
> this isn't really a headcanon for c!wilbur (and def not cc!wilbur), it's an alternate universe using a different but similar characterization and a familiar setting. most fics that change pronouns/identities are or should be :pensive:
> 
> but yeah i read that one fic where ghostbur uses xe/xem and they/them and wanted to as wilbur but y'know fucking died and wasn't allowed to be happy and then i remembered 'its l'manberg' vs 'my l'manberg' and how wilbur saw l'manberg as an extension of himself and went 'hey what if i made it funky and sad but in a v different way' 
> 
> ps yeah i wrote this sleep-deprived and rambley

There is warmth in the air, in the breeze, in the breaths Wilbur takes in with a sigh. Sunshine glows on the arms outstretched under Wilbur’s head, laying in the soft grasses half-overgrown and wild.   
  
Wilbur and Tommy are laying, faces to the sun atop the slow rise of a hill right above where the river brushes the shore, sun just peeking above L’Manberg’s walls, beginning to dapple the nation in gold.

Tommy takes a deep breath, sitting up and letting the familiar bottle-blue of his eyes pan over the plains and the foundations of future builds. He turns back to Wilbur and grins, smile sharp and eyes gentle.  
  
“I- I’m just glad L’Manberg is ours, man. She’s beautiful,” he says with a flourish, tossing out his hand.  
  
“ _ It _ ’s beautiful,” is what spills from Wilbur’s lips unbidden, unconscious and yet something very deliberate in the words.  
  
Tommy blinks, then his smile is amped up to full brightness once more and he fixes the collar of his coat. “ _ It’s _ beautiful.” Tommy visibly gives no more thought to Wilbur’s sudden interjection.    
  
It sticks in Wilbur’s mind like a burr, a thorn.    
  
He’s not sure why.    
  
He does not let himself think on it, shoving the thought along with a million others in a dark, dark closet as he and Tommy head back to the rest of the citizens, Wilbur to an office where the only thoughts are expressed in ink and pen.    
  


* * *

  
  
“It’s a very big, and not blown up L’Manberg;” The fireplace crackles and Wilbur sings to the night through a dusty windowpane. His office is so very comfortable. It is also a prison.    
  
“Its L’Manberg, its L’Manberg, my L’Manberg, my L’Manberg.’   
  
The lyrics finish themselves out and Wilbur’s eyes are closed, the tune warmer than hands pressed to the cold glass, and a shuffle of footsteps jerk Wilbur from the reverie.   
  
Tubbo is there, looking amused at Wilbur’s slight scare, lips quirked and his coat missing from his frame and collar of his white shirt upturned.    
  
“You alright there, Wilbur?”   
  
“I’m fine, Tubbo. Sorry. You did startle me, I admit.” Wilbur says, turning back to the window, flicking a brown-eyed gaze over the lights in distant torches lit.   
  
“I didn’t know you changed the lyrics, by the way.” Tubbo steps up beside Wilbur, tilting his head and letting a dusting of bangs fall into his face.    
  
“The- The lyrics?”   
  
Tubbo blinks. “‘ _It_ ’s L’Manberg’ to ‘ _My_ L’Manberg’, right? ‘S nice either way, I think, so it doesn’t really matter.”   
  
The line's always meant the same thing to Wilbur.   
  
“Oh.” Wilbur brings a hand up and bites at a pinky nail. “I’d thought it was-” The words are whispered, Tubbo appears not to hear.    
  
Tubbo merely notices Wilbur biting at his nail and tugs the offending arm down, scoffs, “Come on, Wilbur, Tommy’s been trying to get you to quit that for ages now, Big Man! ‘Sides, you should go to bed at this point, I think. You’re up before everyone else.”   
  
Wilbur is dragged down the hall and shoved into the room with ‘Wilbur’ carved on a small wooden sign and a pencilled in ‘Y’ after the ‘B’, unceremoniously forced to bed by a 16 year old.    
  
There is no sleep in Wilbur’s room. There is a desk, and an oil lamp with a smoke-stained scar on one side of the glass, and there is a false bottom to the drawers with ink and pens and paperwork Wilbur’s hidden after Tommy’s and Niki’s confiscations in an effort to get Wilbur to sleep.    
  
They don’t work, of course, and as Wilbur bites too-chapped lips and spills ink over fingernails, a memory from the day the pair had rifled through the room arises, a memory of their shared banter and another one of Wilbur’s bones of fragments of thoughts not allowed to be thought upon occurring and getting shoved into that closet of skeletons, a graveyard.    
  
“You see, Wilbur, if you don’t start finally going to sleep on time, we’re going to let Niki take your job.” Tommy had snarked, waving a box of pen nibs around in his hand.   
  
“That’s right, Wil, if you don’t quit working all the time I get to be leader!” Niki crows, faux-triumphant. She’s sorting through a stack of papers, all creamy white and unfinished, ponytail splaying form the base of her neck and getting stuck around her own coat’s button.    
  
Tommy’s arm freezes in midair, and he turns to Niki, one eyebrow slightly higher than the other.    
  
“Wait, is there a girl version of the word president? Like- President is the boy’s word for it and girls would be Presidette or something?”   
  
Niki frowns, and Wilbur feels a breath hitch before she wonders aloud.    
“I’m not sure, actually. I’m used to  _ Präsident _ in boys and  _ Präsidentin _ , for women? So maybe-”   
  
“It’s just- It is just president.” Wilbur corrects, a faint hint of- desperation? leaking into the words.    
  
“Oh, so girls and boys can both be president.” Niki says, nodding before Tommy hums and they turn back to imagining Niki’s reign of terror over L’Manberg. Something was still wrong in Wilbur’s stomach.   
  
Something still is.    
  
He whirls from the desk and tosses his coat off where the garment slides from the surface and slouches to the ground. He scrubs a hand through his hair. Slides under his covers, and rolls onto his side, staring out at the room and desperately not at his closet that reminds him of skeletons and secrets and ‘Its L’Manberg’ and ‘My L’Manberg’ and ‘His L’Manberg.’    
  
He goes to sleep.    
  


* * *

  
  
One day Wilbur walks the sun-soaked wooden path through the Greater Dream SMP minutes out of L’Manberg, heading to a forest with an axe over shoulder, smile gentle.   
  
“Yeah, Eret’s looking for more dyed glass for their castle, I think,” Badboyhalo is talking to Sam, both walking past, and Wilbur freezes, turns.   
  
“Eret is- Their?”   
  
Sam blinks, and then makes a small laugh, shoulders relaxing at Wilbur’s confusion.    
  
“Oh yeah, Eret uses all pronouns now. Makes sense you wouldn’t know yet. See you, Wilbur!”    
  
The pair leave.    
  
Wilbur doesn’t know why his heart sped up at the sentence, and he chalks it up to the mention of Eret. He flees to the forest, axe over shoulder. His lips are pursed, face dark.    
  


* * *

  
  
L’Manberg is a nation.  _ It _ is a nation.   
  
It is walls on fields on rivers on land that was fought for and lost and gained by a sacrifice.    
  
It is a symphony, still being conducted, still waiting for melodies to segue into one another, to complete.   
  
It was built by the hands of a musician and a general, and a king and a commoner.   
  
Wilbur calls it an extension, a mirror in the face of a nation and a wall.    
  
Wilbur is its sculptor, the shadow over the once desert of a land, an ongoing song, and he is president.   
  
He is. It is.   
  


* * *

  
  
Wilbur loses an election and a nation and a home, and lives in a dark ravine of hollow echoes and halls and cold stone that gives a chill that seeps to the bone.    
  
He loses it all.   
  
So Wilbur tosses himself into a new persona, a mask of bitter and cold and grim smiles and he wears a coat that skims the floor, he ties his now significantly longer hair back with a leather tie, and he becomes the antithesis of all those heroes Techno’s storybooks lauded, he becomes villain and the antagonist and the bad guy.    
  
He never was all those men in history he’d read about, who Tommy compared him to; those who were strong and were warriors and fought with swords and shields and weapons instead of feathered pens.    
  
The citizens of L’Manberg wanted to him to be the leader, the general, the president and the man they all looked up to and yet kept to the side, a figurehead and the boy hardly old enough to rule a nation, a portrait of a hero.   
  
Wilbur is not one of those men.    
  
So he is a villain, he thinks, and he is, and he wears the title with pride.   
  
Pride is heavy. It hurts Wilbur’s chest more than the secrets he keeps in the pit of his chest.    
  


* * *

  
  
When Wilbur is a villain, everyone says he is so many different things.   
  
Wilbur is fire, is a ticking time bomb, he is unruly and wild and wrong and insane and disillusioned and mad.    
  
Wilbur doesn’t know how to explain to them all.    
  
He’s been a slow burning fuse all along. Wilbur’s been all these _‘_ _ it _ _’_ s all along. Wilbur’s been-   
  
Blink. Shove the thought into a grave darker and deeper than Pogtopia.    
  
He’s always been a spark, a flame, an unfinished symphony. Wilbur is soot, the ashes of ages and memories and happiness past.   
  
Wilbur is-   
  
There’s an echo of footsteps, a light flickering atop a staircase, Techno’s frame lit dimly by a torch in his hand. Wilbur stands up from where he was sitting against the wall.   
  
“Wilbur? It’s midnight.”   
  
“I’m coming.” Wilbur leaves the string of thought loose and fraying in the wake of his shadowed figure.    
  


* * *

  
  
13th. There is less than 3 days until war. Until Wilbur brings a country down on itself. On Wilbur.   
  
There is a crushed cigarette carton on the floor and the last cigarette in between Wilbur’s fingers, and smoke rises from one cherry-red tip. Wilbur’s breath comes out a coil of grey, wrapping around the other hand lifted to drag ash-tipped fingers through it.    
  
There are so many things Wilbur has to do, to say, to get the weight that’s been pulling down on broad shoulders for years out, to be ready for a finale of Wilbur’s own making.    
  
Speaking to Tommy will have to wait for the morning of the 16th. It would hurt too much otherwise. And Wilbur’s already sent off a letter to Philza- Nothing explicitly said but the news of a declaration of war, and ‘I hope you wish me luck,’ scrawled in the pages.    
  
But there is-    
  
There is that pit, that closet, that graveyard Wilbur’s not had the courage to ever seek out, as full of secret thoughts and whispers that Wilbur had never let think about.    
  
Something feels dangerous about it. Something mourning too.    
  
But Wilbur needs to be ready to die and so the pit in Wilbur’s chest is not left to fester, but memories recalled and thoughts linked and finished and-   
  
Wilbur’s eyes are open desperately wide, heart pounding. The cigarette is dropped on the floor to burn a hold into the trenchcoat’s fabric splayed where Wilbur’s leaning against a wall, facing a button and a chair.    
  
And Wilbur stumbles to shaky legs, bites the tongue that is so close to saying the words aloud.    
  
Hands are placed against a cool stone wall, fists formed and Wilbur stares at the symphony that was engraved into the button room’s walls with a knife in the hands of a desperate conductor.    
  
Wilbur drags splintered nails over every ‘my’ carved into the walls, replaces new lyrics with old and they all mean the same thing.   
  
And then it laughs and the person heaves as it does.    
  
Wilbur’s L’Manberg is dead and soon enough it will be too, and it doesn’t give half a shit, too caught up in the euphoria of the smoke in its lungs and of words sounding right and that years’ worth of secrets poured into a grave deep in its chest have been spilt, onto the stone floor and around its boots and leaving a scar so deep it’s cold when Wilbur breathes.    
  
The air is so cold, and so fresh and so clear when Wilbur is gasping on tears and bringing bloodied fingernails to its chest.    
  
There is a smile on its face, wide and grateful, and the wet trails of tears glitter down its cheeks and to where they’re making their way down its throat.    
  
Wilbur sings that song on the walls. Over and over, voice breaking and cracking and shattering in its throat, the chorus changing back and forth, ‘my’ and ‘its’ swapped out every line.    
  
The line's always meant the same thing to Wilbur.   
  
And Wilbur was never meant to be.   
  
It was never meant to be. 

**Author's Note:**

> now cry bc u remember that philza says 'you're my son' when wilbur's trying to get phil to stabby stab


End file.
